I --- ·- -- 1 '_L ._llllllft j -::tJ--- --■ ___ ._=,q APPROVED:_ '-------­ (Kester Svendee.n, Advisor he Thesis) VITA Name of Author : Ellen Louise Hurt Place of Birth: Tulsa, Oklahoma Date of Birth: February 25 , 1935 Under graduate and Graduate Scboolo Attended : Central St ate College, Edmond, Oklahoma, 1952 - 1955 San Diego State Colleget San Diegot California, 1954 University of California, Berkeley, Ca l ifo rnia, 1960 University oi Okla.homa, Norman, Oklahoma, 1955- 1959 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 1960-1964 Degrees Awarded: B. A. Ed., Central State College, 1955 M. A. , University of Oklahoma, 1958 Ph. D. 1 University of Oregon, 1964- Areas of Special Interest: Literature of the English Renaissance Relevant Professional Experience: Director of Publications, Central State College, l956-I957 English 'Teacher, Bu.rba.nk Junior High School, Berke ley, California, 1959-1960 Teaching Assistant . University of Oklahoma, 1957-1959 lnetructo:r of English. University of Oregon, l 960. l 964 ' - - -- -- ~ -· ·-~ -• ___J_J THE PROSE STYLE OF ROBERT BURTON: THE FRUITS OF KNOWLEDGE by ELLEN LOUISE 8UR T A THESIS Presented to the Deparunent of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 1964 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF STYLE. ll BURTON 'S PLACE IN THE TRADITION OF RHETORIC ••..•• . ..•...• 29 Ill THE MASK OF DEMOCRITUS: THE PERSONA AS A STYLISTIC CONTROL . . 84 IV WORDS, IMAGES, AND FIGURES , 134 V THE SENTENCE 187 VI THE ORDER OF THE WHOLE 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . • , . . . • • . 290 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF STYLE In every age appear certain shibboleths which seem to charac- terize and explain its preoccupations and goals. Surely in the English Renaissance, a time which saw itself as an active participant in traditional culture. an honored phrase was 11 Nosce teipeum. 11 From many sources, Greek, Hebraic ., continental, men sought knowledge of themselves and the world outside reflecting them. It often seems surprising to us that the Renaieeance man, so often praised for his exuberant hedoniem and .rebellious ways, should have consciously sought instruction of various kinds within literature. Jestbooks, plays, and lyric poetry existed i,ot merely to delight; useful instruction accompanied and even amplified the pleasure. The purpose of longer epics and meditative poems a.imed to inculcate self-knowledge and right living. And the giant mil"rore of man- -the encyclopedias of science, the courtiers' training books. the Anatomy of Melanc:holy--reilected the image of man and reflected back into man the image of what he wae a.nd what he could become. Because the purpose of Robert Burton 1 s Anatomy of Melancholy is so unmistakably a ae:rious one--to effect a change within the reader-- it would be worthwhile to cons ider the ways by which he hoped to effec t that change . He had a conception o! what knowledge was; to see how this theory of knowledge helped control his way of writing about it should open eome doors into Renaissance ideas about how man learned and how that learning was seen to affect man writing. One o! the clich$e about the Seventeenth Centu.ry which is nonetheless true is that it was a time of cha.oge, of transition. Cer tainly that is true when we begin to conside1: what theories about knowledge were available to Burton. The schoolboys' definition of the shift as that between induction and deduction, be.tween~ and how as the characterizing questions contains much truth. Hooker nea:t" the first put of the century epitomizes the orthodox, n,edieval reliance upon authority, the belief that language and rhetorical investigation could help one reach the truth, which was already stored in an ancient storehouse; Hobbes later is testimony to the newer belief that truth can still be discovered, that ways of knowing are changing. The change Erorn older to modern ecience is not merely that physicians, philosophers, and others who we.re interested stopped believing in the vital spirits and switched over to accepting the theory of the circulation oi the blood. .Behind such extern.al shifts lay changing modes of viewing what man'• mind could accommodate. An.d Burton1 1i ving du.ring that time of cha.nge the Seventeent.li Century, was in ma.ny ways bound by orthodox belief&. But at the same time he wae aware of some of the changes being made in both macrocosm and microcosm. Many problems face one who attempts to relate Burtonrs view to preciee rnattere of style--to die ionJ e:entenc.e structure, and the like. It is one thing to abstract from his work his conception of the world and the role which knowledge plays in it. It is another thing to describe the. quality of hie diction, to judge the sorts of rhetorical devic.ee he uses, the syntactical construction o! his eentencee, and the structure of the Anatomy as a whole--to pursue the sort of descriptive analysis which Morrie Croll, R. F. Jones, and Geo:rge Williamson have done in such an illwninating fashion. 1 To put the two together is yet another task. Unfortunately, paat scholarship and criticiem provide little help. Williamson places him in the Senecan camp; Gamaliel Bradford 1A mong the- several works done by the three on prO::i: style these are recommended: Morris Croll, 111 Attic P:roee 1 in the Seventeenth Century," Studiee in Philology, XVIII ( 1921). 79-129; Croll, " Muret and the History of 'Attic Prose/" PMLA, X:XXl.X (1924), 254-309; Croll, "The Baroque Style in Pl'o~e: 1 11 in Studies in English Philology: A Misc~llany in Honor of F. Klaeber, (ed.) K. Malone and Martin Ruud (Minneapolis, 1929); Richard F. Jones, "Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century, 11 PMLA, XLV ( 1930), 977-1009; George Williamson, The Senecan Ambl~ Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago, 1951). 4 represent6 a. typical school who simply talk about hi5 robuetnessj or- ma..nliness, or other qualities unsubstantiated by proof. Recent scholarship has been concerned with his utopia, or with inclusion o! motifs conunon to other contempora r ies. Only Leonard Goldstein has attempted to relate his thought to his way of expres-aing It--and hie conclusion, that Burton's style is a "confused lwnp, 11 still seems to beg the question. 1 Nonetheless, such a relationship can be made, not with the buoyant rashness of a Wylie Sypher, who would suggest that Jacobean statecraft caused Bacon to leave out coordinate conjunctions. but by approaching the matter with better tools of log·c, and answering more concretely the question of how a man's outlook toward his subject governs the way he writes about i . Perhaps the relationship is not so patently causative as reflective. It is therefore neces ary to deii.n.f' with clarity the relationship between view and style. Fortunately, with Burton the task may be put on a valid basis because oI his own LRepresenting the various scholarly and critical approaches to Burton are the following articles: Gamaliel Bradford, "A Quaint Old Treatise of Love," Sewanee Review, XIX (1911), 172-84; J. Max Patrick, 11 Roberc Burton1 s Utopia, 11 Philological Quarterly. XXVll (1948), 340-48; Merritt Y. Hughes, "Burton on Spenser," PMLA, XLI ( 1926). 545-67; and Leonard Goldstein, "Science and Litera.,y Style in Robert Burton's 'Cento out Qi Divers Writera, rn Journal of the Rutgers University Li~, XXI (1957), 55-68. 5 statements of purpose: "Democritus Junior to the Reader 11 provides us with a convenient starting point. ln th1e introduction, for example. he. allies himself with the Senecans, who eschewed Ciceronian empti ... ness for a search for truth in the form oft.he period it!elf. Here he shows his respect [or 11 ma.tter, not words11 --a thorny s atement which I believe reflects his Janus-like nature in ~eeming to point toward Sprat• s later cha.rnpioning of a more denotative language but al so reflecting the traditional view of the special power of the word ilsel!. He rna.kes cleat" that his own massive accumulation of knowledge is not vain but is instead intended fo-r the eminently "pract.ica1 11 purpose of helping his reader regain that first fine innocence and health o! his grand pa:rents. But how does one see the way in which his vision is fused Vil.th hie style? That a final comprehension of his vision grows from aenaitiv-ity to his sty]e is a critical t&u.ism. But what Hi otyle itself? Before we continue to anatomize Burton, it Ls i.m.perative that we. like Burton. digress briefly upon this first conce-rn: seeing what s1.yle means. Such a digression i &. ab for Burton, not a cul de sac so mu.ch a.s a way station. Once we see in general what we are s :udying, we can look at Burton in particular more clearly. or the erms i that apothecary's shop, the language of literary criticism, the term style .ia among th most elusive. That the word 6 itself is a dead metaphor, meaning originally a writing instrument, a 11pointed object, bone or metal, for ).ne:cribing wax"J hardly clears the confusion in critical and scholarly writing. On the one hand there is an Arthur Quiller-Couch aeeumi.n.g that everybody ca.n ainiply ~ that 11 style 11 is synonymous with 11the art of writing well 11: on another side is an F. L . .Lucas, who distinguishes between a 11way of writing11 and a 11 good way of writing, 112 but is still concerned with exercising 011e 1s talents well enough so as to impose a good style upon one• e letters a.nd inte.r-offic:e memos. And recenUy arrn·ing on the scene have been a number of scholars, primarily linguists 1 who would say that in the study of .style, value judgmentB are some- what irrelevant: that every statement as an artifact necessarily embadie s a unique style. 3 It i e c l ear, then , that before one can study the style o[ any single author it will be necessary to examine various definitions of this slippery conception, discarding some and adopting the ideas of others which seem moet fruitful. Among those definitions which, 1 F . L. Lucas, ~ (New York, ·1~',) , p. 17 . 2Lucas, p, 391. 3Helmut Hat:z;feld, 11 Scyhstic Criticism as Artminded Philology, 11 Yale French Studies, II (1949), 62 . --, --- •-__ ._, ' J though spirited, la.ck substance, are those of W. C. Brownell, who equates "s tyle" with something roughly like 11 .tlair 11 and of A.rthur Quiller - Couch, who simply lets the reader prove upon his pulses the presence a! that desirable and somewhat mysterious thing, style. Nor are the often-quoted dictums of Sp-rat, 11 S0 many things, almost an equal number of worda 11 ; of Swift, 11 Proper words in proper placee 11 ; and of Buffon, "The style is the man himself" very hel pful , though each contains in obliquely suggestive ways important keystones of some de!initione of style and styles. Since neither mere enthusiasm nor motto can sufiice in the preliminary task of defining style, we must look to more responsible conceptions. John Middleton Murry, .for Lnatance, ha& summed up the Lhree key meanings of the term as 11 personal idiosyncrasy of expression, u the "technique of expression, 11 and the highest achieve- ment of literature--"a quality which transcends all personal id.lo~ syncrasy, yet needs--or seems to need- ~pereonal idiosyncrasy in order to be manifested. Style, in this. absolute sense, is a complete fueion of the personal and the universal. 11 Finally, Murry conclude a, 11 A discussion of the word Style. iC it were purBued with only a ---- •- ~_-_.--_- t fraction of the rigour ol a scientific investigation, would inevitably cover the whole of literary aesthetics and t.hc theory of criticism. 111 Historically, the ruling notion was that of style as a gilded garment upon the body of thought beneath. W. K. Wimsatt conaidere representative ol this point of view the entire discussion of rhetorical figures in Quintilian's ln6t..itutee, 2 And in Do Oratore Cicero ehows t.hi s belief in the s parat~on of thought and style when he says, 11 Betwi.xt the formation of words and that of thought there is th.is difference: that that of words is destroyed if you cbange them, that of the thoughts remains, whatever words you think proper to use. 113 lt is easy to see how this conception would remain regnant so long: even in wl'iting a grocery list. or memorandu.m, one is conscious that as the ideas become bo.rn and take shape in words on a page there is som how a 1see W . C. Brownell, The Genius of Style (New York, 1924); Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing (New York, 1961) Thoma," Sprat, History of Lhe Royal Society (London, 1702); Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Clergyman, Lately Entered into lfoly Orders, 1721, Prose Works, ed. Temple Scott (London, l898), Ill, 200 -201; Buifon, An Address Delivered Before the French Academy [ g~ncrally known as the Discoura aur le Style) 1753, in Lane Cooper, Theories of Style (New York, 1907), p. 171 ; and John Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London, I 9-• ), pp. 3, 7. 2 w. K Wimsatt, J:r, 1 The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson {New Haven , 1941), p. l --_ ._ ___• _ _i ·l J 9 difference in the Corm between Lhat first faint glimmering within the mind and the jottings upon the paper--a.nd, concomitantly, that there are a num.ber of ways in which any simple notion could be expressed, each differing yet rnea,uog roughly the same. 1t is that very roughness of approximation of the initial notions. though, that i.s a key to seeing what ia now almost a critical dogma-- not the schism between idea and expression, content and form, but rather the uniqueness of ach version of the statement. Yet this very view of the uniqueness of the individual sentence as artifact, appeal- ingly dogmatic though it may be, could undercut the study of style itself. If, as Croce suggests, ea.ch utterance is different from each other, then the study of style could degene!'ate into meaningless relativism., into a world comprised of an in.rinity o! discrt;te particles. As Richard Ohmann has asked, rru style does not have to do with ways of saying something, just as style in tennis has to do with ways of hitting a. ball, is Lhere any thin g a· all which is worth oanu.ng s :yle? 111 Or, if we say with Andrews Wann.iL:g that "style is part oi what we 1 Rii::.hard M . Ohmann, 11 Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style, 11 in Stvle in Proee Fiction (Englieh ln5 1tcte Essays), ed. Harold C, Mar 10 (New York, 1959), p. l. 10 ordinarily c:all meaning. 11 1 then we have stepped into yet a.not.her thorn bush: what is the meaning of meaning, and what is the particular place of style in the larger province of meaning? The answers to these questions are not so easy to come by as one might wish. Fortunately. Ohmann- -who dared to criticiz.e the truism of the fusion of content and form in the first place - - has provided a wa.y out of the selva oacura that allows us to see thought and style as one. but al so allows the study of" 5tyle to -remain as a poB151ibl e activity gx-ouoded upon a iirm basis. He begins first by attacking one answer th.at has been adva:nced--that of I. A. Richards, who would allow the clothing of sllnilar 11 thought-forms 11 in a variety of patterns. Richards would say, for example. that 11Soc"tates is wiset 1 and 11 \Visdom belongs to Socrates 11 are but two word patterns into which one 11 thought.-form 11 - •in this instance, predicating a characteristic of Socrates--can be molded. But as Ohmann points out, these two are not exactly the same ideas- - congrueat, but not identical. Consequently, Richards ' notion of 11 thought -forms 11 leads ultimately to the same impasse as Croce 1 s: the r e would be an equal number of sentencee as ttthought-forms. 11 1A ndrews Wanning, Some Changes in the Prose Style of the Seventeenth Century, (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1938), p . ZO. Cited in Ohmann. 11 The major weakness of Richards' position. as Ohmann sees it1 is in the notion of thought-forms as somehow separate from the th inke r . Anc;i it is here that be begins to formulate the baBis of style: Neither th external world, thenJ nor our "experience" of it offers any ready-made forms o! thought to the analyst who wishes to see style as the way in which ideas get into words. Vfhat nature does offer to expe'rience. however, and exp er ience to language, is a C<;mstant formlessness. Just as, in the existentialist view, man is confronted in hi.a search for ethical oTder by the indifference of the universe. ma.n i.n his search for Perceptual order faces a chaotic worJ d- stu..lf which gives no hints ae t.o the proper method of sorting. But Camus c.all5 the world's moral ana r chy benign, in that it allows us to consider man the maker o! his own morality, and the chaos pictured by modern psychologists has a parallel advantage: the perceiver, accord- ing to this theory, shapes the world by choosing from it whatever perceptual forms are most useful to him--though mo st often the choice is unconscious and inevitable. The unfriendly behavior of tigers may, to be sure, co~rce him in his perceptual sorting, and his choice of perceptual forms largely governs his choice of linguistic categories, but the selections at:'e initially free, in an important sense. 1 It is the way in which the writer freely chooses, breaks up and manipulates the 11 Heraclitian flux" that 1s the beginning of style . The stream of experience is the background against which 'choice• is a meaningful concept, in terms o{ which the phrase •~ of saying _!51 makes sense, though 'it' is no longer a variable. Form and content are truly separate if 1content 1 i.8 not bodiless ideas, but the formless world~ stuff. And if such a hypothesis carries forward the 1ohmann, pp. 8, 9. 13 help transmit conception& and emotional responses from author to reader. But in another sense, an author' B style i.s a way of creating meaning a.5 the writer confronts the flux of experience and controls it with words. In some wayi; his private meaning is his and his alone, incommunica.ble. But nonetheless there is some. exchange of mean- ings: or at least we. must a.ct upon that assumption; and thus the meaning created by the writer can be sensed and analyzed by a reader. Within that act of meaningful c:onfrontationJ howeverJ certain patterns begin to emerge. Most write:i:s do not set down pages of gibberish: they usually attempt to make sense to t.bemeelves: and 1 secondarily, to others. Though the range of choices is enormous, it is still limi ted: certain words and sentence patterns tend to recur. A writer 1 a style then can be considered an expreesive eystcm (to use Amado Alonzo 1 s term) with certain meaningful characteristics. Just a5 the act oI communicating is a complex action, f!ven more so is the attempt to assess the style of a given work, since etyle is, a.ccording to R. F. Jones., " the moat complex phenomenon in lit!!!rat:ure ... the resultant of all forces, known and unknown, underlying lite.rary development, 11 and, according to T. E. Hulme, it is 11 forced by the coming togethe.r of many differeot thoughts and generated by their contact. Fire struck between stones. 11 How is the critic then to go aboul judging thie 11 £i re struck between stones" 14 without becoming burnt himself? The Spanish scholar Alonzo has provided one mode 0£ attack: since etylistic a ia concerned with the expressive system- -which embraces everything - - the critic must see ea.ch part, 11 a.s, in painting, the form, the harmony, the thing changes if, Ior example, the painter places stone io front of red velvet rather than Ile sh. Furthermore, all pa :r ts are but smalle-r expressions of a deeper 1thought ' 0£ a poetic nature: an intuitional vision of the world and of life, felt 1 lived,, and objectified in the: poetic creation. 11 For those who would judge this aspect of Alonzo• e approach too emotional, requiring powers to which most cl us do not ha.ve access1 R . A . Sayce eeezi a way out of the difficulty by using the word style 11 as a convenient designation of the linguistic structure which underlies and indeed constitutes a work of literature. 11 1 In the final effect, however, Sayce's book on French prose meets Alonzo 1 .s prescriptions: through working with concrete unite--noune, epithets, cliche's--he is able to show how the ordering 0£ language of individual writers does embody their world view. What is appealing cl.bout his approach, then, is bis lack of p-retension and his lucid attack. I. Richard F. Jones, "Science and English Prose Style," p. 977; Thomas Ernest Hulme, Notes on Language and Style, Unlversity of Washington Chapbooks, ed. Herbert Read, XXV (Seattle, 1929), p. 13; Amado Alonzo, 11 The Stylistic Interpretation of Literary Texts, 11 Modern Language Notes, LVII ( 1942), 492; R. A. Sayce, Style in French Prose (Oxford, 1953), p. I. Style can be defined as an author 1 s "expressive system. 11 Though thu. term seems to substitute for vagueneee the connotation of greater concreteness. that iB unfortu.nately not so. I'h.is term 1 too, is a. metaphor. Style is not a system in the. same way that a dynamo is, However, style in general and style in particular do have certain collocations of qualities that ca.n be named, defined, and limited. Not all the charac.terietics in Sir Thomas Browne• s style appear in Robil!lrt Burton• EiJ for example, and for di.scoverabl~ reasons. The term...!!!_ used in the same way that mathematicians and linguist5 use the term is thus a helpful concept. Just as a grammarian of the Chomsky persuasion would hesitate to define a verb in one or two words but would gladly describe the several wa.ys in which a verb can operate--and cannot operate--eo too can styha tu:e, the 11 art-minded philology 1 1 ° describe the eet o! coneide ratio n e which are the province of style in general and particular, all of which comptise the artist• s 11 expressive eystem. u ln ma.n.y w ay a the concerns will overlap fields long studied and not regarded ae necessarily the province of stylistics- -the writer• s place in the history of ideas, even his 8chooling- -nonetheJ 86 all these must be 1Hatzfeld, p. 62. l6 considered as helping to form the eel oi qualities which expresses his personal vision and his st:yle--which isJ as D. W. Rannie holds , 11 the critic 1 s primary concern. 11 1 The student of literature writing today can be grateful !or th e light cast upon the nature of style from a variety of sources. When considering poesible mode& of attack upon style, however 1 he l8 !a.c E- d by such a plethora o! opposing schools aod contradictory ideas that he is inclined to be less than grateful for this Gods 1 plenty. Some battle over the rightful province of style and stylistics, others ove:r the problem of the relationship of la.ngue and parole to literary study. Among those who battle over the boundaries of style a.nd stylistics are Charles Bally, who believes that styli!: pursues an esthetic end, stylistic & a scientific one, and Ma'l'cel Cressot, who believes the relation not one of exclusion but inclusion. To him, style is a department of stylisticsJ transcending it on a. nonver bal level. From these two de!initiooa we can draw the t:onclusian that style is a personal quality, the thing studiedt a.nd styli s tics the science of that study. Once we have named the approache s:, tho ugh, how should we study style? Leo Spitzer 11 starts from the observation of a linguistic detail which in some way diverges from the norma1 11 ; 1 Hatzfeld, p. 62 . --- ~-- .. ~- -- --• - __ _I __ J. 17 Marouzeau and Cressot would study an individual writer 1 s work ch iefly ae a reprie:&entative o! the entire language, 1 For the latter approach we need chiefly linguistic data. for Spitzer• s approach the power of divination. If we become too much concerned with this battle, or with t.he battle over langue and parole, we might neglect seeing style as a perceivable quality. Burton differs !rom Browne not merely in bis preference !or certain kinds 0£ clauses but in quality as well--one which seem.s .somehow greater than the sum of its linguistic partB. We might neglect the characteristic of style as a personal statement which embodies the emotional and intellectual contours of the man epeaking; we might not con eider style as a way of se eiog, a mode of apprehension. By metaphor, by punctuation, by word order both reader and writer come to know through style. Style, then, links the reader and writer. The words, symbols, dev ices such as irony-- all these reflect common e,xperience and help create an experience; they mediate between the author and his audience. 1See Sister Clare Eileen Craddock, Style Theories as Found in Stylistic Studies of Romance Scholars (1900-1950) {Washington, D. C .• 1952). pp. 15 - 16, and Sayce, pp. 1, 3. 18 In order to apprehend these links, what sorts of met.hods: should a student of style use? ls it even possible to describe a literary s.tyle with any degree of surety? Here the methods used by students of style in the plastic arts can help those working with literature. One answer, for instance, has been provided by Thomae Munro in an e1:uay outlining a highly developed met.hod for the study of style in architecture , painting, and other forms . The answer tliat he reaches is that a style is a combination of traits: that, for exam.ple, a limitable set of cha.racteristics--pointed arches. flying butt-reaaes, etc . - -combine to form the Gothic style in architecture. That notion of a set of characteristics could just a.e easily be applied to htera.ry &tyle-etudy, ae it indeed has bee n done with W0lfflin' 8 system. of categories - -closed-open, linear-painterly--defining Baroque. Munro does make cleal' that not all trait-complexes are necessarily styles 4 however; sometimes a particular combination occurs only once. 1 lt is easier to establish such combinations in the. plastic arts , since most traits are quantitatively measurable, and because the matc.;rialti a{ literature, words, slip and slide elusively. Nonethele:!h•, certain qualities of word& are measurable; one feels that ultimately a Jai.rly complete description can be made. I Thomae Munro, rrstyle in the Arts: A Method of Stylistic Analysis," Journal of Aeothetics and Art Criticism, V (1946), 128- 158. 19 What are the nee es sa.ry components of this finite set of. chaTacteristics which. we call a style? Some years ago Herbert Read in English Prose Style outlined one system. Though in many ways a limited book it doee provide a concrete basis. He begins with what he calls diction, which includes the basic linguistic. urtit8 of which a style ie comprised, covering words.t epithets, a.ad metaphors under this rubric. He then builds upward with sont.ence structure, the paragraph, and a variety of types of arrangement. In addition to these tangible units, be would have the student of proee style consider intangibles: fancy, imagination, impresaionism.1 expression- ism, eloquence, and unity, ae well as the modes 0£ exposition and narrative. 1 Read1 s mode of attack ie perhaps the best known in EngliBh. Scholars in the Roma.nee languages aleo hav e cont.ributed greatly to the methodology of dealing with etyle--and have contributed uurneroue contradictory techniques, as well. Alonza holds that the science of style of describing adequately ao author's 11 expressive system, 0 must deal with the following: the ways in which the 11 form 11 of the poem developed through the creative process, the poet• B rational thoughts as transformed into poetry, order, the poet's exploitation 1 Herbert Rea.d, English Prose Style (New York, 1928). pp. v-vii. 20 o! the possibilities of bis own idiom. the expressive intentions with \'ihich he bas tilled out and renewed common syntactical formulae, the expressive procedure to which he has subjected the meaning of words and phrases, and rhythm. 1 The student must consider these matters al so: the world view, the effect upon the reader, the 11 modus operandi of the psychic forces which form the composition o! the work 11 in order to come close to a final appraisal of the work and ita etyle--which is not just a collection of external, separable character~ istics but the expressive system o! the entire work. 2 As Sister Clare Eileen Craddock' s study of" the wo-rk in stylistic e: o( scholar& in the Romance languages points out, Alonzo 1 s manifesto is among the best of current stylists 1 : it anchors itself firmly in the work itself and allows for the im_ponderables--which are1 of courise, the most difficult to aeeess 11 scientifically. 11 The thinking of most othe"t scholars follows Alonzo• s; near I y all agree that primary attention must be paid to language and linguistic matters, for language, as Helmut HatzfeLd makes clear, 11 in the widest sense comprising the whole structure 0£ a work, is literary style. 113 Rene Wellek and 1 Alonzo, p. 494. 2Aionzo. p. 493. 3Hatzfeld, p. 62. 21 Austin Warren would agree: 11 Sty listics, conceived in this wide sense, investigates al l devjcea which a.im at aomi:: spec i fic expressive. end and thus embrace IS far more tha.n literature or ev~n rhetoric, All deviceo for securing emphasis or e "p] icitness cctn be classed under stylistics: me taphorB, which permeate all lang uages, even of the most primitive type; all rhetorical figures; syntac t ical patterns. Nearly every ling u istic utterance can be .studied from the point of view of ite ex:preaeive val u e. 111 However, despi te the wide area5 of agreement, Lh e r e are several significant differences. As Hatz(eld says, one moot point i s the role of the author. Leo Spitzer, for i n stance, would very nearly psychoanalyze the author; to Amado Alonzo, on the other hand, the author i5 almost i-rTelevant. 2 But in s um.. though there is a measure of disag-reement, nearly all critics working today would ag ree that stylistic study should cover these matters: the lingu i stic basis of the work, the write:r 1 s place in a. historical contt:!xlJ the demands of the genre, the s t.ruct:ure of the work, and Cel'"tain intangi- ble qualitit.!s euc h as tone, a tmosphere, and world view, And mo.st would make clear that here, as in c1ny critici$m of literature, to focus 1 Ren~ Wellek a.nd Austin War r en, Theory of Litera tur e (New York, 1949). p. 18 1. 2Hatzfeld, p. 63. zz upon only one aspect is somewhat false . Rhythm and tone spring from trope B and die tion; all are governed by structure. Thus, abstraction is only temporary; in a litera.ry work, all interact to create aty1 e. Before outlining the major concern& of this study, it ie necessary to point out that mo st of the Be theot'ists are still working within the framework of the Inda-European languages; many of rhe older critics. were thus quite unaware that certain conceptions which they held -- time, space. causation -- are not necessarily " true. 1 1 .Bound by Western languages, they simply did not know what we know today after seeing the contributions oi contemporary linguists who, analyzing the structure of other quite different languagesi have pointed out that we see thingo certain ways not necessarily becauee they are 11 true 11 but because our language causes us to see them that wa.y. lt would be impossible to cover all the territory being mapped by contemporary liAguists, but I do think that we in this age are fortuna te to come to know better how our language operates: tjeeing how Hopi deals with tense, we can see better how English deals with conceptions of time. Consequently, whenever possible, the work of such men as Wboxf, Sapir, aod their colleagues will be brought in to show i5omething of the behavior of English - -in ways of which Herbert Read and Robert Burton were unaware but which can shed much light on our study. 23 And thanks to the contribution of 1 ingui sts, we have better- refined tools for working with style. No longer must one compile Ji 6 ts of subordinate clauses in order lo do a. respectable job; instead, as th~ brillianl studies of W. K. Wirnsatt. upon Samuel Johnson and Jona5 Barish on John Lyly have proved, 1 it is possible to work with concrete linguistic units--a.nd to see that they are genuine reflectors of the authors' views of the world. Despite th work o! such men as Barish and Vfimsatt, though, falsely scientific, overly statistical studies ha.ve bee.n made. 2 1w. K. WimBatt, Jr., The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1941), and Jonas Barish, "The Prose Style of John Lyly," Journal of English Literary History, XXll! (1956). 14-35. 2Such a study is " The History of Certain Aspects of the Structure of the English Sentence, 11 by Robert Roy Aurner [ Philological Qua rterly, II ( 1923), 187-208], Although he has compiled numerous charts and statistics, he has dealt with external characteristics, attempting critical judgments hardly more perceptive than saying that Dryden has 11 an increas,: of structural complexity" and that Lyly 1 s style has. a 11prevailing formlessness. " Then. too, Zilpha Chandler's study [An.Analysis of the Stylistic Techniques of Addison, Johnson. Ha~litt, and Pater, University of lowa Humanistic Studies, Vol. IV, No. 3 (Iowa. City, 1928)] has a very elaborate statistical apparatus base d upon diction, sentence length. phrases, and sentence 6tructure. but the conclusions are subjective and. l think. often wrong. It seems unlair to adjute the reader of "The Vision of Mirzah" or 11 The Vision oI Justice 11 : "But we roust remember that Addison made no attempt to be strong a.nd forceful. 11 11See also footnote on p. 136. -~-- . -• ---~_j :' . J 24 To follow through completely with the injunctions of Alonzo, Rea.d, and other theorists would require several lifetimes. In 5tudies of a more limited scope, ao this one ro.ust necessarily be, one most choose among the tools available those, most fitted to the task. This :study of Burton, then, will p•oceed according to the following order; First, we will place Burton i.n the cont@xt of the historical view of language, rhetoric, and style to which he belonged. Such an initial placement is necessary because his views of language as a channel fo-r knowledge differed somewhat from ours and must be judged accordingly. Hia views affect consciously and unconsciously what he, as a student of literature himself, thought he was doing with the language. To define his conceptions, we will consider his own explicit statements as well as a number of recent studies--W. S. Howell 1 s, Perry Miller's, Sister Miriam Joseph's. We need to complete one more circle before we descend to work with more concrete matters of language. That second, narrower circle is the point of view, the persona, from which Burton is writing. One important control, after all. is the mask of Democritus which h e donsj and this, I think, is an important consideration. It is requi~ed by one of the many generic bases of the work--satire; it inllueoces the tone; and it reveals h.is tu.ndamentally Christian hwna.nistic world view. 25 From here the study will circle downward to the most concrete concern of all- -the words BuTton uses. Prime considerations will im::lud@ source. the parts of speech. and placement in conte.xt. Models for this sort. of study exist, in Sayce 1 s study of French prose and F. E. Ek.felt• s essay on Milton. 1 In fa.ct. a pronouncement of Sayce 1 s is that 11 T he literary study of language must be founded oo a detailed examination of single words and their variations of meaning. 11 Obstacles, though, face us immediately: words do not stand still. Chameleonlike, their meaning changes historically and with their surroundings and with the observer. "They are like Prouse s characters, whose nature is radically transformed not only in ti.me but in the opinions of those with whom they come in contact. " .But, chameleons though they may be, they still contain two elements: stability and variability; "Stable because a common response is possible, becau5e communication does take place; variable because each word is slightly different wherever it is used, depending .for its effect en the speaker or writer, the hearer or -reader. the verbal context, the general context. " 2 1F. E. Ekfelt, "The Graphic Diction of Milton's Prose, 11 Philological Quarterly, XXV ( 1946), 46-69. 2sayce, p. 127. 26 Clooe.ly connected to an examination of diction is that of images- - not just words themselves but words invested ......-ith meanings beyond the immediate context because they are common symbols or because the author, through repetition, makes them so. What Burton does with the motif of food and eating in 11 Democritus Junior to the Reader 11 is1 for ex.ample, a .source of hwnor and a crystallization of his pu.rpose- - to make the reader k n ow, by sen:!!lory means as well as int..J.lectual. The words and images do not exist alone, however. They a.re all contained within the larger unit of the sentence. This next aspect of style provides a. rich vein to be: mined--historically, because of the battles over Senecan and Ciceronian styles--battles recorded by George Williamson, R. F. Jones, and Morris Croll in recent yt:ars. Still another aspect of historical importance in connection with these larger units of prose i.s 6urton'a use of the tropes, the colors of rhetoric.. Though he disclaims in 11 Democritue Junior to the Reader11 conscious use o! zeugma, anaphora., or the like, he uses them all. Therefore, a student of seventeenth-century prose must consider the. use oI these traditional Cigures. Other concerns a.re Burton• s apparent jaggedness of sentence structure, copiouenes.s, pac-ing, timing, and tone within the sentence -- for it is in this unit th.at we can see one of his chief airna: to reproduce the effect of the mind thinking. Z7 Next, we will consider the total structure of the Anatomy--a formidable task, to be sure, draped as it ie over innumerable sectioni:; and subsections 4 larded with dig ·ression.s . Yet there is a logic: to the oTder in which Burton placed his materials . .Although he complaine that, for lack of amanuenses, the book is not as perfect as he would. wish it~ it is obvious that a conscious. artisL trained io his tradilion of rhe toric has aomP. principles of control. The elaborate synopses of partitions appearing at the first of each of the major divisions is proof of his attention to each part -- al.though digreseions give a eense. of freedom within that meticulous plan. It is, finally, a critical truism that the structure guides the tone, the quality, the 6tyle: of the whole. 1 Running throughout this examination of Burton. ae. a kind of ground bass, is a theme central to Burton 1 s purpose: hi:s attitude towa'l'd knowledge. rt is central to his viewpoint concerning Lhe 1The te>..t l have chosei:i is the .Floyd Dell-Paul Jordan-Smith edition published l;)y the Tudor Publishing Company in New York in 1927. It is not the standard edition; in fact, no edition can be said ta be etandard. The three-volume edition of the Reverend A. R. Shilleto (London. 1893), though usually considered the standard text, ia filled with erroreL of fact. Based on the faulry seventh edition of the Anatomy, it contains. spelling and punctuation that were not Burton 1 is. Thi.\! other modern edition, that done by Holbt'OOk Jackson for Everyman' s Library in 1932, rectifies some oI Shilleto 1 a flaws. But 1 have chosen the Dell-Jordan-Smith version because it iBI in one volume, because the Latin is translated) and because the index is particularly clear, 28 function of rhetoric, as I shall show in the next chapter. lt is central to his use of the satiric mask of Oemocritus--a mask that is deligh tful l y comic but also deadly se r ious. It is central to his choice of words and, most impo r tantl y, to the sentence order. Arld, finally, his conception of man ' s use of r igh t reason as he attempt s to make sense of himself and the world controls his choice of subject, structure, and world view. CHAPTER II BUR TON'S PLACE IN THE TRADITION OF RHETORIC With all his varied and far-ranging eruditionJ Burton lived 1n a tradition o! knowledge which is ours no longer--in a time when, crudely stated, most people thought that knowledge was one. At this time we will investigate the traditional v iewpoints toward k.nowledge--what it was, how man got it. and what he did with it-- and relevance of this concern to Burton 1 s own place in the traditionj be .r e to his own overt statements and later to more covert literary practices. On the one hand he exemplifies the view that knowledge and techniques of investigation were fairly complete and that 1 consequently, a man 1 s con tribution to the sum of hum.an knowledge lay chiefly in the rhetorical aim of rearrangement and reminding the audience- .. to create, as he says, somethi.ng "not his own, and yet his own~ 11 With this conception, one which later in the century is to appear in the forefront in the skirmishes of ancients and moderns, Burton allies hirnself with the Christian humanists' viewpoint toward the state of man. Part of that complex set of assumptions was the idea 30 that Iallen man could not hope for genuinely original contributiorte to thought. To return to the realms of truth, fallen man should refer to the ancients, to the ages nearer the golden timeis when man thought more. clearly and truly . This, one of many classical and medieval holdovers, was particularly strong during Burton• :s time because of its relation to the theory of the decay of the world, a theory haunting Donne, Goodman, and others, and contributing to the fascination with melancholia. 1 Yet the traditional ways were changing. lt le true that Ra.mus 1 highly 11 rebellious 11 method was chiefly a rearrange- ment oC Cicero 1 s prescriptions, but his changes still denote something of the profound c h ange in the Sevent~enth Century in man• s conception of ways of investigating the truth. And BuTton was living right in that time. of controversy. Though Oxford was not the hotbed oC Ramism th.at Cambridge wae. it is inconceivable Lhat he could not have been aware of that issue. And if he can resolve the question of a pluraliLy of worlds in an 11 0 altitudo, 11 he is still a.ware of the major theories of cosmology available to him, though he does not seem ta be completely awar@- of the.ir implications for 5hatteri.ng the Lraditio nal 1 Amon,g several articles dealing with this topic, these are typical~ George #illiamson1 11 Mutability, Decay, and Seventeenth - Century Melancholy," Journal of English Literary Hiotory ()935), 121-150, and D. G. Allen, 11 The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance PeGsi- mism, " Studies in Philology, XXXV 11938), 202-227. 31 view ol the cosmos. To place Burton neatly in a camp labeled either 11 aocient 11 or 11 modern11 is impossible. As one aware of so many cootemporary controversies, he might--yet might not have--realized the implications of the changes. The la$t part of tN. S. Howel1 1 s. Logic and Rheto.ic in England, 1500-1700 outline, these changes but show6 that they are spread out over a number of years: Howell regards some of Bacon• s ideas as genuinely revolutionary. 1 And the Advancement of Learning predated the last edition of the Anatomy by almost half a. century, Let us first look at the traditional conceptions of knowledge before we begin to see in what ways Bui-ton pa:r-t.icipated in the older forms. An individual style, in Edward Sapir's words. 11 not only ini:.orporates [ the basic forms of the language]; it builds on them,. 11 2 We a.re talking not just about the words but about words and their world. And considering the traditions of knowledge a.nd its formation in rhetorical .modes during the Renaissance is a particularly exciting activity: the two were consciously considered as separable, but intertwined. 1w. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-17 00 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 397-432 . 2 Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York, 1949), p. 227. 3Z The first step in establishing the main strands of the tradition 0 [ knowledge in which Burton was operating is to consider the construction of the world that a man could know. Those of us living in the second ha! f of the Twentieth Century must make some grea.t leaps of mind and imagination in order to realize the! form of the world that Burton and c:ounl.less others before him saw. Description of the traditional world picture--or p1ctures--available to Burton has been made unnecessary by the contributions of many scholars. Su!fice it to say here that the universe which men looked out upon for hundreds of years was a magnificenUy conceived one, a dynamk world in which physic.al and spiritual acted in linkecl harmony, in 1we are indebted to E. M. W. Till yard, whose Elizabethan World Picture (New York, 1944) is a key work oxplaining th• chief metaphors of the cosmos--chain, corrcspondenc:ee, dance; to A. 0. Lovejoy, whose The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1936) traces that conception from its inception through various forms; to Marjorie Nicoleon, whose The Breaking of the Circle (New York, 1950) defines the ruling idea oJ the circle of perfection and the world 1 s body. Num@rous other5 have defined the world as pictured in men1s minds: W. C. Curi-yin Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences (New York, 1926) has shown how Chaucer and his contemporaries believed thl! world was ma.de. ln his History of Magic and Experimental Science {New York, 1929- 1941}, Lynn Thorndike has amassed enormous amounLs or material defining the outlook upon both tht! ~l!'nsible and eupe:rsensible worlds held by the well-known and the obscure; and Kester Svendsen in Milton and Science {Cambridge, 1956) has shown how Milton, late in the Renaissance, utilized conceptions of the world held by classic medieval, and Renaissance men, outdated though they were to become. 33 which man as the nodal point contained and could apprehend matte-r Crom the lowest mineral to the highest Good. This ordered universe, meaningful for man i.n all its spheres, is a.n imaginative and logical creatiot1. which n1ust cause us to see its maker as a paragon o! anirnal l!!I apprehending like a god. Hiram Haydn has eaid that thi.s traditional world vie.wJ inhe r ited in the Renaissance from classical antiqui ty, Christianity, P l atonism, and in telligent observation, is "rooted in order and law, lt displays design and purpose in every part, and h ence proclaims the unqualified rule o{ Mind, which hae produced unity. 11 1 Because th i s worl d was produced by a uni(yi.ng Nlind, men 1 s sour i::e of knowledge about it ca.me, they thought, from Cod. All questions - -wha.t iB worth knowing? h ow do we know? why do we know? · -we r e r elatt:d back to th~ s:ou.rce of knowing 1 the logoe, the Creating Word. On the fir~t pagu of Lhe first partiti.on of the Anatomy Burton h.irnael£ is completely oi;-thodox when he cons1der6 God as not only the source of all thinge but also o( man• s knowledge about them. To Bur ton, God ~e the end of man• s knowl edge, as well. The first action which .Burton attributes to Adam in Paradise 1s to know God. 1IDram Haydn, The Counter-RenaLasance ( ew York, 1950), p. 133 . 34 This conception of God as source and goal of man's knowledge we must keep in mind while exploring traditional theories of knowledge. Viewed literally, God i• the ruler of the physical place, heaven, which rna.n desires to reach after traversing the spheres. Viewed spi.rltually, God ie final rruth, but creator as well of human limitations. It i& this aspect of God as limiter (tbo1.1gh the orthodox Christian would not see it that way) that we must also remember when consider - ing th.at apparently abhorrent notion of forbidden knowledge. We can see more clearly this conception of God as the source of knowledg e i n the following statement by Haydn. His working through contrast with later science help~ us see the traditional idea--both because of what it is and what it is not: The world system o! Thomas Aquinas and his colleagues is pre-eminently concerned with the rational and theological Science. of God; that blueprinted by Galileo and Descartes and Spino2:a and Newton and Locke, with the J:'ational and mathematical Science of Nature. The scientliic aim of the Scholastics, unlike that of the later group. was not to discover the mathematical laws of operation of the uni - verse, but rather to achieve a " compTehensian of the meaning and significance of things, above all the chief end of man, the meaning of human life and of all creatioo related to it. " They sought answers to the questions • 1what? 11 and 11 why? 11 a.swell as 11how? 11 Starting from accepted principles about the nature of God and God 1 s universe, and employing a great linked and interlinked chain of reasoning. the Scholastics found their ultimate goal in the contemplation of what alone gave meaning and purpose to existence, of what alone constituted final truth for them- -God. On the other hand, the seventeenth- century philosophers and scientists, also beginning with - -- - ■ --- -.! J 35 hypotheses, but with mathematical ones, a.nd checking their findings by expe r iment, concentrated upon ascertain- ing the character of mechanical operations, which they considered mechanical.. The one group measured a 11 purposeful 11 nature qualita.tively, the other a mechanical nature quantitatively. Hence, while one s trove to reconcile its natural philosophy with fundamental theological premises, the othe r 1 s most characteristic :religious expression was -radically rational is tic, in accordance with its scientific philosophy. Both systems are highly intellectualistic, but the alder employed reason in the interests of the Chr i sticrn. religion j the more recent wa..s inclined to exalt reaaon above the claims of any particular institutionalized r eligion - - or at lea.st to free its skirts of the clinging and hamper ing hands of creed and dogma. 1 Th ie is the traditional view of what the cosmos was shaped Hke--in other words, the acene of action for ma.ni it is ruled by God, the $0urc:e of all knowledge and hence the governor of man' a province of knowledge. But what was the traditional view of know- ledge? Obviously to B u rton and Lho s.c, in hiB tradition knowledge meant much the same thing that it meanB to us-- an accumulati on o f material, a storehouse of fact and idea equipping us to act. Howe vtH , several significant differences emerge. For one thing, right know- l edge was not ju5t an indiscriminate collec:.tion of facts about anything u.nder the sun; ins te ad, ae a late r discussion will show, certain va.in Bpeculations were de!initely outside man• e rightful sphere of concern: 1Haydn, pp. 26, 29. 36 eome knowledge was prompted by sinful curiosity; it was forbidden. The proper sort of knowledge to seek was therefore that which led co wisdom, which connoted man 1 s reasoned use of brute !act without. And, according to the theory that man had fallen progressively [arthe-r a.way from the golden into the iron age, much o! that wise knowledge upon which man 1 s mind could work was the legacy o{ the past. In fact, Howell has pointed out that the traditional formula for invention ( seeking out and developing knowledge) running through scholastic and Ramis;t schools was seen as 11 not the process of discovering what had been hitherto unknown, but aa the process of establishing contact with the known, so that the storehouse of ancient wisdom would yield its treasures upon demand, and would bring the old truth to bear upon the new situation. The ten places of Ramus, and the ten categories o{ Aristotle as interpreted by the scholastics were devices for establishing contact between the new case and the old truth. 11 1 What were the major concerns o! tbi s " old truth11 ? The con- cerns that reflected che rage for orde.ring man and the world--which Haydn defines as the emphases of the Renaissance Christian humanist or orthodox tnedieval world view: ' 1a. program which reconciled philosophy and religion. Teason and faith, nature and grace. 112 1Howell, p. 347. ZHaydn, p. 67. 37 Yet the kind of knowledge concerning man was not the mere weaving of old clothes for the Emperor: those within the tradition-- whether of Platonist, Chris tian. or even alchemical bent--srressed continuity and -uniformity. lt is those of us living after the circle. had ehattered, after the world's body had been dismembered, who sepa.ra.te spirit from sense, thought from extension. Despite minor rebellions along the way (the Nomina.Hsts, for example} the mai11 stream o{ the: tradition involves the conception that " k nowl edge (or truth) is one, 11 1 that .spirit and sense interpenetra.te, that to pluck at one thread 1.0 the texture of truth iB to cause all to move. For this r eason an emblem upon a page represents the moral truth it illuminat es; for this reason it is really adequate to explain that monkeys are named airnia because of their similarity to human beings. 2 Erich Auerbach has shown that with Dante's view o{ reality, the allegorical mode is perfectly natural--indeed, inevitable/ Kester Svendsen, that the numerous encyclopedias, popularizations of traditional lore mingling acute obseTvation with naYve superstirution 1 demonstrate this same Hin,,pulse to synthesis. 11 Thet"e might be ski"rmisbes on the road: 1Hay